Wabasha Street Caves

The caves were dug for mushrooms. The St. Peter sandstone under St. Paul's river bluffs is soft enough to mine by hand — the silica miners went in for the glass sand in the 1840s, and the mushroom farmers followed because the caves stayed at forty-eight degrees. By the 1920s the tunnels along Wabasha Street had become what Prohibition made of them: a speakeasy, then Castle Royal, the nightclub carved into the bluff that opened in October 1933 and ran the swing era underground.

Castle Royal was a gangster cave in the gangster city — St. Paul in the 1930s was the crooks' haven, the town where John O'Connor's police department offered the Midwest's bank robbers a safe harbor as long as they behaved. Dillinger and Ma Barker and Baby Face Nelson moved through the city; the Castle Royal's dining rooms and bandstand were where the nightlife and the underworld shared the same sandstone. The bullet marks in the fireplace are the record of what kind of club it was.

The caves had a second life as the cheese capital — a University of Minnesota professor figured out in the 1930s that the tunnels replicated the Roquefort caves in France, and St. Paul spent the war years making blue cheese underground — Land O'Lakes and Kraft both had cave space, three million pounds a year, until the imports came back and the cheese era ended. The disco came in the seventies. The tours are there now — the gangster tours that tell the Castle Royal years, in the caves that have been a mine, a farm, a speakeasy, a nightclub, a cheese factory, and a disco.

Wabasha Street is the archive's layered-use file — the sandstone caves that were everything St. Paul needed them to be across a hundred and sixty years, the tunnels where the gangsters drank in the same rooms the cheese aged in, in the bluff the glaciers left.